Rimbaud: Intermediary Militant – Through Rimbaud's Season In Hell

"If the poet
can no longer speak for society,
but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch"

– Henry Miller

"It is possible
that the impossibility of poetry is itself the condition of poetry"

– Georges Bataille

The question of how to subvert
power, to live a life, was a problem that Arthur Rimbaud didn't so much
formulate as enact. Reading his poetry again, a poetry of improvisational
emotion, it's possible to be struck by a forceful contemporaneity that
has such works as 'Season In Hell' read, now, like a political manifesto.
But it is a politics of a different kind, a politics that has given up
any redemptive vectors. Instead Rimbaud seeks to create an exodus, a chimerical
materiality of the possible, that can lead us to a politics of becoming.
As he drifts towards the end of the word Rimbaud takes us on a detour
through composite cities and countryside trysts, passed colonial beachheads
and debauched bars, and delivers us into the company of quotidian messiahs;
revolutionaries of everyday life whose unaimed benevolences reek of crimes
against self-interest. Accompanying Rimbaud in his flight from a permanent
state of emergency based upon this 'right of self-interest', we can get
an inkling of what we can leave to politics: national origin, institutional
representation, inherited morality, wage-labour, Christ, Satan, wise-guys.
But Rimbaud's exodus, his self-abandonment, is not a bid for a transcendence
that would posthumously mark him out, but a deep, nomadic immersion in
the social unconscious. Thus, with Rimbaud, there is the inkling of a
preemptive strike on a pleasure-principle that would, like the politics
of security based on a disavowed abundance, make pleasure and pain equate
to an equilibrium that is made indicative of a death drive – a return
to an inanimate state; the fear of experience that fuels a legislated
neutralisation of life. Instead Rimbaud surmounts sociable equidistance
and Caucasian equations through an inveigling of death; he took the piss
out of its politicised threat, facing up to death-in-life with a surfeit
of energy that turned trauma into the will to experience, into autotraumatisation:
"I summoned my executioners so that I could bite their rife butts before
I died".

Rimbaud's politics of becoming
was premised on a use of trauma that gets beyond pleasure and pain. This
is the experience of living life that Rimbaud unprotectedly sought out
and, as we read, it is not so much that these experiences were chased-after
as the raw material of a 'poetry' that could make him belong, as they
were experiences that ensured a lack of fit between himself and the literary
norms of the time – "I thought laughable the great figures of modern painting
and poetry". This scorn for his precedents, akin to his scorn for the
sovereignty of the law, was not so much a transgressive pose as a means
for a heightened affectivity: the very raw material, not exclusively of
poetry but, of a politics of becoming, an abandonment of the 'self' from
all the apparati of identity as they are assured by family... state...
poetry. So, at the very outset of a Season In Hell, one of his last works,
Rimbaud abandons the coordinates of belonging even to his own autobiography.
He has no antecedents, he is a non-pseudo nigger, a pagan. He has made
himself an orphan, a potentiated multiple, that, being no longer an individual
but a precipitate of emotional layers, can only identify with those that
are 'a law unto themselves'. Seeking thus to see through the eyes of a
criminal and becoming "the great criminal, the great accursed", Rimbaud
intuits that the law is a personalisable lexicon and that the most feared
crime is to communicate your own self-contesting law, to be amply prepared
for the trauma of self-abandonment. That both poets and politicians can
be cast as 'legislators' leads Rimbaud to be a stranger in his 'own' language:
"But always alone; without family: I even have to ask what language I
speak." Rather than seeking release in the form of a pleasure or pain,
rather than seeking synthesis in the form of a single persona or a character
that speaks the 'truth' in a possessable language, Rimbaud's deliberating
incognito, his immanence, becomes a source of experiential tension, an
enlivening contradiction. Permanently unfulfilled, at odds even with a
language that can liberate him, Rimbaud embraces a mode of living that
can lead to freedoms beyond those enshrined in the Declaration of the
Rights of Man: affectibility. As Deleuze has written, "affectibility...
is a capacity of affection without personality... that becomes all its
modifications and yet... constitutes a manner of existence that is positive"
[1]. Rimbaud slides between the multiple personas that voice him and pulls
every conceivable face. His mug-shot is a composite. His poetry is 'free
indirect discourse'.

Rimbaud's 'affectibility' is
what has him outside the law. Even before the pleasure principle came
along to announce its death sentence, its fear of the positive energy
of desire that took on the pronunciation of lack, Rimbaud's hatred of
the law makes us reflect that the fear of life has become entangled and
codified in legislation. This fear translates into the concept of 'security'
which, as Marx wrote, guarantees to each of the members of a society "the
conservation of his person, his rights and property" [2]. But this conservation,
which makes people into the objects of a legislative mediation, presupposes
the lives it legislates for to be bounded entities, it presupposes that
what is feared in life is an 'affectibility', a giving-ourselves-over,
which can not only pierce our 'binding', but lead to the self-abandonment
of becoming. Such autonomous expenditure has no need of a legislation
that protects only those who seek to conserve. Not having anything to
conserve – personality, property, a name, a country – Rimbaud, for better
and for worse, lives at the uncodified behest of the senses. He 'becomes
all modifications'. This taste for life as becoming, as 'self-mediated
being', is what, on the one hand, makes Rimbaud's 'poetry' a free indirect
discourse, a compound of cited voices that shift, and, on the other, stakes-out
the import of his writing as a political manifesto that affirms life as
that which it is possible to live without guilt: a living exchange of
linguistic ardours. Rimbaud, who seems to intuit that the law is based
on protecting the private property of private persons, and who, wanting
more than the conservation of the self, being desirous of more than a
choice between the war of pleasure and the law of pain, is not one who
seeks to pay back the inherited debt. Scorning the securities market of
the state, Rimbaud leaves it to the leftists to conserve the law by changing
it: "I armed myself against justice". But he has another form of life
in mind, an inconvertible demand for a politics of becoming: "several
other lives, it seemed to me, were owed to every being".

Rimbaud seemed to know that to
abandon oneself to 'affectivity', to become a 'being' between, was to
drop beneath the scan of a characterlogical radar. To fall from a law's
eye view, to become a non-person, a self abandoned shadow of a self ("I
am hidden and not hidden") is to embrace the trauma of being declared
'a nothing': "Quick a crime, so that I may plunge into nothingness, according
to human law". But this 'nothingness' is more than full. It is declared
as nothing by 'human law' because, as an act of becoming, it does not
seek to preserve itself, it does not seek a stable representation that
could be merited, weighed, accounted for. As Bataille has said of nothingness:
it can sometimes be "the being envisioned in the totality of the world"
[3]. Being in the world thus, unmediated and unindividuated, being "absorbed
by everybody... a multiplier of progress" [4], is to run the risk of 'anguish',
which is to say, Rimbaud runs the risk of no longer offering himself up
for the protection of being represented by political pleasures, but of,
instead, attempting to make himself heard as an unrepresentable collective.
Responsible for humanity, Rimbaud sheds guilt : "I belong to a race which
sang on the scaffold; I understand nothing of laws; I have no moral sense".
His poetry, amoral to the degree that it rejects utility, criminal to
the extent that it urges the formation of a new language, is a poetry
that, facing up to the inexpressible, defies itself as being authored
by himself as an individual: "Universal intelligence has always thrown
out its ideas, naturally; men picked up part of these fruits... author,
creator, poet, this man has never existed" [5]. Thus can Rimbaud rail
against the 'egotists' and 'one eyed intellects' who call themselves 'authors',
for the affectibility that Rimbaud pursued led him not only to urge a
war on law, but to challenge the very limits of experiences as these are
represented by a possessable knowledge voided of sensuality and a use
of language that insulates us against the risks of a stumbling expressivity:
"What a life. True life is somewhere else. We are not in the real world."

Affectibility as a modality of
thought is, possibly, a way to bypass what Rimbaud calls the "false significance
of the ego". It is the ego, cathecting itself, that the legislators seek
to secure through means of constitutional documents. It is this same ego
that valorises personality, that, reigning-in our becomings, conserves
our failure to communicate because, being in possession of a point-of-view,
we seeks to 'express our self' rather than to 'be expressive', to be a
locus for 'expressivity'. This impasse has been revolutionised by Rimbaud
as an experience of struggling with a language that, not being always
malleable enough to resist inherited knowledge, can result in the end
of the primacy of the word as it is alloyed to the primacy of knowledge:
"I understand, and, incapable of expressing myself without pagan words,
I would rather say nothing." Here Rimbaud, who always valued music, indicates,
perhaps, how affectibility as a form of thought enables 'understanding'
without it necessarily having to be be written or spoken. Sensualised,
Rimbaud 'understands' without having recourse to the right words. 'Saying
nothing' for Rimbaud is not the end of thought, but the end of being said
and the beginnings of a communication by means of 'pagan words', words
that may not even be formed from letters, but from sounds ("I became a
fabulous opera") or from coloured letters ("I invented the colour of vowels").
In this way affectibility, in conflict with a use of language that limits
thought to an accumulation of concepts, changes not so much what we think,
but the way we perceive that we think: "It is wrong to say: I think. One
ought to say: I am thought" [6]. Rimbaud rejects the inherited knowledge
of philosophy that, in linking thought to an individual and making knowledge
a matter of private property, conserves our failure to communicate. Instead
communication is enhanced through a mistrust of a knowledge that has declared
war on the praxis of the senses by means of the law of the Logos: "Since
the declaration of modern knowledge, Christianity, man has been deceiving
himself, proving the obvious, puffed up with the pride of repeating these
proofs, the only life he knows!... Mr Wise Guy was born with Christ!".
In this light the 'universal intelligence' which Rimbaud mentions is not
so much an indication of an ethereal God but, after Marx, a matter of
the 'general social wealth' of culture. Thus 'to be thought', as Rimbaud
says, is not just to be a mouthpiece, but to actively place the onus of
thought onto affectibility; a mode of sensual apprehension that can lead
to a reformulation of knowledge as that which arises from being open to
the 'universal intelligence' of the world: a shared ability to experience
life, to be a locus for poetic expressivity ("Your own ardour must be
the task").

Rimbaud's conflict with language,
leading him to utter the phrase "no more words!", is a way that he takes
his conflict with the law into a new dimension. Rather than having a personality
to 'conserve' and offer-up to representation, Rimbaud, voicing in his
'poems' the characteristics of a multiple personality ('free indirect
discourse'), seems to embark upon guerrilla actions against those substructures
of language that ensure that we remain opaque and separable from one another:
the decentred voice of his poems is simultaneously masculine and feminine,
singular and plural, active and passive, past and present, sardonic and
sincere. Language as a material, its suppleness, is that which is lost
when, its substructures intact, it is promulgated as a means to shore
up an ego that expresses its self, that reiterates the possible. Bataille:
"Language is lacking because language is made of propositions that make
identities intervene" [7]. These ego driven identities that speak in order
to be returned-to their own subjection are what Rimbaud seeks to be exiled
from, they are what provoke him to flee from the men of letters ("I don't
know how to talk!") and which lead him to say of Baudelaire that "he lived
in too artistic circles". For him, before the end at any rate, language
should be supple enough to sound-out a compound emotion that renders us
dumb, it should be the means to bring to expression what it is impossible
to say. As Giorgio Agamben has pointed out "it is the very sayability,
the very openness at issue in language, which in language we always presuppose
and forget... because it is at bottom an abandonment and oblivion" [8].
Yet, just as language is not an abstract entity (it does not doesn't possess
'openness' in and of itself), the utterance is dependent upon its situated
addressees and Rimbaud, in declaring his open defiance of State-sanctioned
laws that enshrine alienation and lead to death and servitude, surmounts
oblivion and abandons himself to his capacity to say anything. Having
a variety of places to talk from and a variety of personas to talk through,
securing thus his 'affectibility', a guiltless Rimbaud can use language
not as a mode of dissemblance, but as a means to communicate his 'inner
experience'.

But Rimbaud wanted more from
language, more from himself than was possible by means of language: "the
point is to arrive at the unknown by the dissoluteness of the senses"
[9]. To 'arrive at the unknown' is not only to reject the common knowledge
of the day but it is, by means of the 'dissoluteness of the senses', a
way to re-experience a prelingual phase. The fluctuation of the emotions,
our wordless affectibility, is what overpowers language, makes us stammer,
and renders us dumb even though we have won the power of speech. To experience
the prelingual is to be rendered disarticulate and decentred and, yet,
it is not so much that Rimbaud resents a 'fall into language' as an estrangement
from the 'pure life of feeling' as it is a means to bring forth affective
knowledge by means of gaining access to inner experience. In many ways
this inner experience is what is deemed superfluous. It is not required
in the world of work ("I abhor every trade"). As a timeless compound of
affect this very 'unsayability', its traumatic pressure, is what ensures
the drive to communicate. In many ways, then, the 'unknown' which Rimbaud
wants to arrive at could be said to be inner experience, the sensorium
of affects, that, unable to be fully articulated in language, are what
come to form the raw material for becomings: approximations of feelings
that can be enacted through language, a 'capacity for affection without
personality'. So, when Rimbaud speaks of an "alchemy of the word" and
of "turning words into hallucinations", it is as if he intends to work
the fracture of language, its lack of fit with inscrutable affect, and,
from there, situating himself in the fluctuational space of inner experience,
to, by means of 'poems' as prearticulations, translate affects into insinuations
of shared meanings. Such a semiotic of the impulses, whereby language
is made malleable by its being compacted with a re-experienced memory
of the prelingual and by its simultaneous intent to make affect communicable
by means of language and against language, is perhaps what was hinted-at
by Rimbaud in one of his most famous passages, a sequence that heralds
the avant-garde of the next century: "I invented the colour of vowels...
I organised the shape of every consonant, and by means of instinctive
rhythm, flattered myself that I was the inventor of a poetic language,
accessible sooner or later to all the senses."

When, in his famous letter to
Paul Demeny, Rimbaud offered that he wanted to "make himself" a seer rather
than a poet, it is not so much an aspiration to religious fervour that
Rimbaud is urging onto himself, but a politics of becoming, a living self-production
and hence an abandonment of conserved being. To be a seer requires an
access to 'inner experience' rather than to the divine logos, for the
knowledge of the unknown which Rimbaud seeks cannot be a knowledge that
is preformed and readily articulatable in language, but a new form of
knowledge, a 'non-knowledge', that, in surpassing any usefulness, comes
to register an affectibility, a passion, that is crucial for wider bonds
of communicativeness to be established than are possible between poet
and reader, politician and citizen. As Marx has said at the onset of the
communist movement: "What is needed above all is a confession... to obtain
forgiveness for its sins mankind need only to declare them for what they
are" [10]. This is the sense in which Rimbaud is a seer. He has dropped
his defences to such a degree that his inner experience does not make
him feel guilty. Quite the opposite: he has no secrets because, expressing
his inner experience, pursuing unsayable affect, he reveals that the interminable
mystique of inner experience (the domain of poets and priests) is what
ensures a mysticism that trades in pleasure and pain, deferment and punishment.
Beyond the pleasure principle, the abandonment of equilibrium, Rimbaud
reveals that inner experience is what is eminently shareable – there is
an 'otherness' of inner experience ("I is another") that is reduced to
a self-flagellating privacy. It is social separation, instituted in the
affectless language of politics and by a common knowledge reduced to proprietorship,
that hinders this inner experience being communicated between people and
its being seen as 'sinful'. For the 'sins' that require forgiveness are
nothing other than private thoughts that have not remained private and
unenacted, but have been uttered and acted-out between people. The sharing
of 'sins', the 'declaring them for what they are', thus loosens the hold
of the law and reduces the power of guilt, and enables social bonds to
form that are not mediated by judgmental knowledges (commandments, constitutions)
that lead to voluntary servitude, but, in Rimbaud's case, are the relational
material of a law beyond law, the formation of contracts of trust: "Poor
men, workers! I do not ask for prayers; with your trust alone I shall
be happy".

With these contracts of trust
we are faced with the paradox of giving a legal form to an openness that
enables inner experience to be shared between people, an openness that,
in its affective interminability, cannot be subject to decrees or judgments.
In other words, what does it mean when, beyond the law, we seek recourse
to some means to be at ease with an articulation of our inner experience?
At one level an answer lies in the form of poetry itself; the way that
by becoming aligned with a recognisable tradition of writing we seek a
means with which to expose ourselves; our feelings and fears. But Rimbaud,
in his trajectory towards abandoning poetry, is always moving beyond this.
His rejection of the law and the state, of nationality and poetic antecedents,
has him not only quest for a new language of affectivity ("this language
will be from the soul to the soul, summing up everything, perfumes, sounds,
colours..." [11]), but has him begin to run this idea of a new language
alongside a poetical practice that is indistinguishable from the living
of his life. For Rimbaud it seems that writing poetry is a means of writing
the autonomous law of his life that he hands down to us not on stone tablets,
but on scraps of doodle-filled paper. He becomes a stateless legislator
and his poems become contracts of trust that can encourage the propertyless
to speak to one another. This possible contract between the affective
– the ones who own little except their ability to empathise and feel-for
– is, in Rimbaud, moved on from its submergence in literary craft towards
the realm of a recast 'free speech' that has no need of parliaments and
courtrooms for its legitmation. With affectibility as a modality of thought,
the unknown in us, our inner experience, is what can change our lives.
Shared between us without being reified into knowledge it is the communicative
risk that presupposes a politics of becoming that is instinctively opposed
to the way we are inveigled to live our lives. As Foucault, in his late
seminars on 'free speech' has said: "The problem of freedom of speech
becomes increasingly related to the choice of existence, of the choice
of one's way of life. Freedom in the use of logos increasingly
becomes freedom in the choice of bios" [12].

This choice of the way to live
a life, vouchsafed in Rimbaud by his being free enough with language to
want to turn 'words into hallucinations', is a traumatic encounter with
possibilities that are withheld in favour of the profitable maintenance
of an equilibrium. Not only does Rimbaud present these choices with the
metaphor of his own displacement and nomadism, his coming up against the
dialectic of language, testing the logos against the bios
leads him to abandon the writing of poetry altogether. For Henry Miller,
Rimbaud's renunciation of his 'calling' is related to his standing "so
clearly revealed to himself that he no longer had need for expression
at the level of art" [13]. This may be the case, but it is also worth
suggesting that Rimbaud's abandonment of poetry is concerned with his
inner experience having less and less need of artistic mediation, a mediation
that would neutralise this inner experience as a canonical expression.
What was needed was not so much the invention of a new language that would
isolate Rimbaud the orphan even further, aligning him with the roll-call
of poets he scorns, but the invention of a free speech, a distribution
of inner experience, that could bring people together as becomings. To
this end when, in his letter to Paul Demeny, he urged upon himself the
role of seer, he outlined a future in which 'poetry would be ahead of
action' and envisioned also that poets would be citizens. In choosing
not to say that 'citizens would be poets' and in thus not elevating poets
to a position above others, Rimbaud's rejection of poetry can be related
to the absence of addressees. This is put to dramatic effect when, in
A Season In Hell, he says "... in front of several men, I chatted very
audibly with a moment from their other lives." In many ways this hallucinatory
line is indicative of Rimbaud having to create addressees, addressees
that, it can be suspected, do not fear that very inner experience that
is creative of 'other lives', becomings. Could it then be that Rimbaud's
rejection of poetry was indicative of missing addressees that could comprise
a 'missing people', a people becoming? Deleuze, writing on cinema – the
art that combines colour, movement, sound and words – offered that "this
acknowledgement of a people who are missing is not a renunciation of political
cinema, but on the contrary a new basis on which it is founded... art
must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is
presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people."
[14]

When Rimbaud refused the trappings
of sovereignty – nationality, compatriotism – and refused to see himself
as a part of a People legislated for in law, it was not simply a matter
of his becoming an individualist rebel devoted to the cause of art. This
thesis of Henry Miller's can be countered by the way that Rimbaud, in
being a poet of 'free indirect discourse' and in his consequent adoption
of the tension of contradictory standpoints in his verse, is not seeking
a representational status for himself. As an 'undecidable' becoming cultivating
lawless contradiction, Rimbaud subsists beneath the level of visible identities
that can be constitutionally accounted for: "my life lacks solidity, it
flits and floats away up above action, that focus the world holds so dear".
Such a solidity may be indicative of the refusal to listen-to and attempt-an
articulation of 'inner experience' in such a way as to bring affectibility
to the fore as precisely that which gives rise to the potential of living
life differently: emotional states not only have their own duration and
means of relational bonding they are what enable us to relate differently
to what we know, 'subtilise' our language and resist being defined as
an abstracted People in whose name we are ruled. Scornful of the colonial
adventure through which national identities were intensively being constructed,
Rimbaud's 'minority of one' was opposed to the abstract generalities of
such a People and posited instead a multiplicity of identities that, in
uncoupling affects from their poetic personification, make affects into
timeless components of identity that are always reaching after articulation.
In this way any solidity that can be achieved is not a solidity that can
be legislated for, that can be secured by a private property of rights
or a proper space for speech, but, beyond such laws, is a matter of contexts
of free speech that encourage the 'missing people' to become responsive
addressees, co-authors of their becomings. Rimbaud's rejection of poetry
– backed by a surplus of shareable affect, by the abreaction of inner
experience and by a respectful connectivity to 'universal intelligence'
(general intellect) – is tantamount to bringing the creativity of the
addressee to the fore. This creativity, a politics of becoming, is constitutive
of passionate associations that mark an improper place of the polis. After
Rimbaud, poems, contracts of trust, become collectively authored social
relations. The impossibility of poetry becomes a renewed possibility for
free speech.

Afterword: This Game Of The
Discursive Real

Much has been left open, unsaid. Bataille's presence, his unfinishd system
of non-knowledge, haunts the text. As the text – my half project – draws
to a close, Rimbaud lives on in his intermediary position: the herald
of a militancy that's been, is to come and is here now. The emotive instant.
The emotive motion of time travel wherein, across history, links accrue
without forming an object. The whole thing could spiral out of control.
I cease with Rimbaud: such a false word 'cease' when Rimbaud is now inside
me, incomplete, possessing me; when Rimbaud, my brother by means of 'non-human
sex', has become another means to practice 'free indirect discourse' :–
I have always only dared to speak of myself while ostensibly speaking
about someone else; there is always this experience of thought passing
through the persona that I can be in the text, and the personae of the
others text, an experience of thought by means of an assemblage, an experience
of thought as a pretence, an access to a 'field' never populated by individual
persons, but by the liberating conductance of energies across time, the
'general intellect'. So to Bataille. 1953. I continue with Bataille after
adding him to the assemblage: it's a matter of me, Rimbaud and Bataille
now. No 'I' at the end of the sentence. The same person. We're one and
the same. This is the power of imagination. To undeludedly say such a
thing, to be given so much confidence, is to accept, not pseudo prominence,
an equality of sameness, but is to accept the 'general intellect', the
possibility of making connections, which is, after all, the baseline of
a knowledge that is feted out of all proportion to this simple operation:
that I am conscious, conscious of the breach of my unconscious, conscious
of the unconscious of social relations and thus open to history as a means
of permanent potentiality, thus open, disgustingly open, to the sharp
signs of affectivity: spinning in a word-sea of stimuli, of poetry as
free speech. Knowledge, if we are to greet it openly, is only experience.
If we must state the obvious then it is not to re-utter something that's
been said before (and hence nondescript to say it again), but both a sad,
crushing, indictement of the way experience is today a matter for legislation
and, with Marx's Letter To Ruge, an acknowledgement that "mankind will
not begin any new work, but will consciously bring about the completion
of its old work". We 'complete' this work by experiencing thought as an
emotional praxis, inhabiting the affective minutiae of history (the hole
in Rimbaud's shoe). So, if affectivity is outlawed by knowledge (thus
the link between law and knowledge is made present), non-knowledge frees
our capacity for affectivity with the bonus risk of ... here comes Bataille,
anguish and ectasy. Which is another way to pronounce 'Rimbaud', which
is another way to say that poetry is "reflective experience" (p138) that
should be recast as free speech. But Bataille 'knows' something else (maybe
he learnt it from Rimbaud who learnt it from a drunken rioter). Bataille
hopes to know how to not know, how to get out of the framework of the
law too: "...And if the violation of the law, being the origin of all
that we love, after the law, more than the law, destroyed the foundation
of thought no less then it put an end to the power of the law?" (p204).
For Bataille, as with Rimbaud, it is a frightfull delight to be leaving
knowledge and the law behind. To have understood, intuited, that it is
a matter of books, access to books, access to the language-key, to a sanctioned
means of expression, that links knowledge and the law – the latter being
that most difficult of subjects to ever know: a non knowledge masquerding
as absolute knowledge. So. Exodus. Rimbaud in the Eden of Arden. No more
project. Rimbaudian Bataille: "Today I could say that the slightest thought
granted to my projects, which exist despite me, surpasses me and overwhelms
me. But the Instant! It is always infinite delirium" (p202). Surpassed
by your own project is: the 'general intellect', 'alienation'. At worst
it's work, forced labour, the labour of pride. At best it's history again,
a laying down of unsuccessive strata, the ineffable of the unexpected,
the affectivity of the minutiae, the suprise that re-triggers access to
risk, to 'reflective exprience', to non-knowledge (Benjamin – coming across
Bataille at the College of Sociology and calling a book 'Illuminations'
after Rimbaud, as well as making One Way Street follow the poetic prose
of A Season In Hell – knows this as a "shot through with chips of messianic
time"). Rimbaud and Bataille. I, their intermediary, who pulls their conjunction
point forward towards its third point – a starburst in a future that's
ahead of me and behind them. Endless points of contact, shared and sharded:
"The unappeased multitude that I am (will nothing permit my withdrawal?...)
... is generous, violent, blind. It is a laugh, a sob, a silence that
has nothing, which hopes for and retains nothing" (p200). To chalk a poetry
of the most simple utterance on the pavement and to hope for a shower.
A blissful release from expression into being an expressive loucus for
becomings that populate the worn out shell known as an individual. This
will be your permit to withdraw, this risk of depossessing your own, our
own, autobiographies. Exodus = untested feasibilty. The interminable instant
of anguish and ectascy: living life as an experience. "Fuck the writers",
says I, speaking in tongues, "they are the ones who enshroud us in silence
without ever having shared in our struggle to attain silence as the limit-point
of language, as the maximum mentasm of the 'general intellect'". The point
of silence is not just to be an everything – the nothing that is uttered
fills the interclocuter with a violent conjecture – but it is to rely
on someone else, somewhere else, to say for us what we would want to say,
hope to say, without being mindful of changing the words or their intonation
(the latter swathes us with music, the former is the loving gift of solidarity).
The point of silence is to acknowledge a kind of trust that results from
struggle, it is to suspend ourselves as the centre of even our own body,
it is to practice the dialectic of the logos and the bios, to be part
and not apart from the conversation: "My writing is always a mixture of
the aspiration to silence and that which speaks me" (202). Bataille speaks
for me and I'll have him speak for Rimbaud too. There is always anguish
in having a voice that the rhythm of silence and free speech can appease.
It encourages laughter, self mockery, which itself says "All I know is
that I know not". The freedom of belonging to error is not terror: "In
this equality with limitless error, wherein I myself am led astray, have
I ever felt more plainly human?" (197). Only the excessive, obscene pride
of the most writerly, those written into life, those who haunt the fringe
of the glossed-over page, can bring us to this 'bare life', this unabashed
honesty, this slush of confession and fascination with 'sin'. Inside out.
"The honesty of non-knowledge, the reduction of knowledge to what it is"
(201). It is defensive pride, it is defences constructed with too accurate
characters i.e. it is annihilation of the multitude within, and hence
severence from the multitude at large. It gags us all with its legalised
tag. For Bataille, as with Rimbaud, there is this constant tension between
isolation and belonging. This is the rhythm of Exodus. It depends upon
a death-in-life, it is vouchafed for by a familiarity with the little
deaths that can be experienced in life: anguish and ectasy, insight and
idiocy. These little deaths destroy our self. We help the process along.
We burgeon into...free speech that builds bonds, contracts of trust on
flaming paper. First something needs anihilating. What? The ego linked
to pride, the super-ego linked to law, the ego-ideal linked to knowledge.
We anihilate possession in order to be 'sovereign' in Bataille's sense
i.e. to rebel against suboordination, to thus discover the motor of desires
rather than the satisfaction of vanity: "I know that without this annihilation
already within my thought, my thought would be servile babble" (204).
Remember Rimbaud biting the rifle butts? Here Bataille, no stranger to
the long dark lucid Night, to defeating the idea of death by making it
into a release from thought, a confrontation with non-knowledge that he
will never know or turn into project, here Bataille, like Rimbaud, assures
himself that, desiring, he can never dominate anything: "Sovereignty is
an act of rebellion against every rule, including the logical rule. A
negation of every limit, of every condition, this is the taste for an
experience that can no onger be limited by any of the given conditions..."
(161). This 'taste for experience' is simultaneously cast as a pursuit
of the 'instant' that assures 'non-knowledge' be nothing less than "a
bond before knowledge" (158). That which is inarticulateable, that escapes
language, and hence the conceit of pride, of knowledge as possession,
is what also escapes a practice of thought severed from affectibility.
This is a new dynamic for consciousness trailblazed by poets such as Rimbaud:
anguish and ecstacy are registered in the consciousness but are, from
there, means of access to the unconscious – there is no dividing line
when experience subtends knowledge and there is no protection from autotraumatisation
other than instinctive bonds that can refigure our means of socialisation.
Vanity, instilled in us by knowledge, comes to be outmanouvered by desires
distilled in us by non-knowledge, the unknown that's ahead of us because
it's always behind us: "How could I be depressed in refusing to take the
world and what I myself am for an unavoidable measure and a law? I accept
nothing and am satisfied by nothing. I am going into the unknowable future.
There is nothing that I could have recognised in myself. My gaity is founded
on my ignorance. I am what I am: being is at stake in me, as it wasn't,
it is never what it was" (205). Rimbaud.